Hi all,
As the title states, I’m interested in making the switch from Windows to Linux. I know absolutely nothing about Linux, other than that fact that there are distros that exist under Linux, and Linux itself isn’t an OS, or so I think.
I have 2 laptops and my main home office PC, which I use for my job and gaming.
My plan is to switch one of my laptops to a Linux distro, and test it out. This laptops only purpose is web browsing, so I figure getting Linux set up to do something as simple as opening a browser is something I am capable of.
Down the road, once I’ve sort of learned on this laptop, I may work my way up to using other distros and dual booting my main PC. Who knows, maybe I’ll even switch over completely prior to Windows 11 rolling out.
I’ve heard getting games to work with Linux can sometimes be a hassle, and can require some fiddling, so I won’t be doing gaming on a Linux distro until I feel quite comfortable.
So with the above context, I’m looking for recommendations on a distro I should use, any guides that any of you may have found helpful, and generally any insight on things I may need to be aware of.
I am fairly tech savvy (probably not compared to most of you), and am not afraid of tinkering with things until they work. Any help would be muchly appreciated, and if this isn’t the correct place to post, please let me know and point me in the right direction.
Better to use something general purpose and very well supported. Linux Mint is probably a better choice right now.
Bazzite is just Kinoite with gaming things out of the box. Which in turn is just Fedora with KDE Plasma but atomic and immutable. It doesn’t get any more general purpose than that. Bazzite even preinstalls a lot of stuff that Fedora users have to add manually, like proprietary drivers. If you don’t want a gaming centric OS, then there’s also Aurora which is the workstation version. I guess my point is that, there’s not an objectively best choice in Linux. Something we often tend to forget is that personal taste also plays a role. I personally used Mint for 5 years and supported the project monetarily. But my tastes changed and I think atomic and immutable is a good path for adoption, since it all works more or less the way people have come to expect smartphones to work. But, with the power and flexibility of x86-64 computing. It perfectly fits the management model of set it up once and forget about it. Specially since OP is specifically mentioning his interest on having a system focused on security. A system that is working just works, no doubts, buts or ifs, it always works and if anything happens that make it not work anymore, you just rollback to a working state immediately without fuzz, it is a pretty neat feature.
I think “gaming centric” distros are pointless. Ah yes, please have Steam preinstalled.
Distros should instead just make sure people can install what they want and setup as they want. Stop trying to please everyone with the out of box experience.
Also I personally think immutable Linux still needs time in the oven. I consider it in early adopter status. We are still working out how to make it work. I use Silverblue but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who doesn’t already have a compatible workflow. Maybe someday it will get more standardized and streamlined but right now everyone is doing there own thing and each system has its own problems.
Well, there’s much more to it than just installing steam. That’s highly dismissive of the effort it takes, including kernel level optimizations and driver space configurations required to guarantee top performance. To suggest it is pointless is insulting to a lot of people and not constructive criticism, at all.